Analysis for Acoustic Characterization of Microbubbles under Ultrasound Exposure

Abstract

Microbubble contrast agents are used in many diagnoses and studied for therapeutic applications. But ultrasound parameters have not been physically analyzed, which means we do not have sufficient data about the parameters to explain unexpected events during diagnosis. The purpose of this study is to obtain sufficient knowledge about the parameters relevant to ultrasound therapy using microbubble contrast agents and to analyze the microbubble dynamics under ultrasound exposure. We measured the acoustic pressures of commercial contrast agent (Sonazoid™) resulting from ultrasound sine burst exposure of 3 cycles at center frequency 3.5 MHz, in various concentrations (void fractions). Results showed that for a high void fraction of 10−4, there appeared a low frequency signal of the order of 100 kHz in radiated echo from microbubbles, and comparatively low intensity level of the driving frequency in transmitted signal. The results suggested some change in dynamics of bubbles according to void fraction. We calculated the bubble interaction parameter β to know the transition range from single bubble behavior to bubble cloud behavior, and concluded that the low frequency signal appearing in the radiated echo is likely to be a resonance frequency of bubble cloud.